


The Scandinavian Defense

by fiordilatte



Category: Aldnoah.Zero (Anime)
Genre: Cheating (at chess), Chess, Dark Comedy, Foreplay, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Post-Series, Salty character study, Skirts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2016-09-03
Packaged: 2018-08-12 08:47:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7928326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiordilatte/pseuds/fiordilatte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Slaine knew that he was not a very nice person.  He was a mass murderer, a pathological liar, a Kataphrakt extortionist, and a chess rule-breaker.  Also a sexy pilot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Søren

**Author's Note:**

> written to [Leave A Trace by Chvrches.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZRxFsMD4UM)  
> big thanks to Kai for all her feedback, and to everyone who played practice chess scenarios with me :’D

_Criminal profile for Søren Slaine Saazbaum Troyard of the Vers Empire_

Born: January 11 1998, in Trondheim, Norway

Nicknames: Bat, Gull, Terran Trash, Douchebag (courtesy Kaizuka Yuki)

Partners in crime: Harklight (reported missing in action), Eddelrittuo (allegedly reformed), Lemrina Vers Envers (granted diplomatic immunity)

Last words on official record: “I no longer have any need for a future!”

Religion: existential nihilism

FIDE Elo rating: unranked

Education: Vers discount bootcamp module (spray and pray methodology)

Established war crimes: grand theft Kataphrakt, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, shitty aim [ _sic_ ] resulting in grievous bodily harm, murder, culpable homicide, patricide, terrorism, insubordination, scheming, emotional manipulation, misrepresentation, destruction of property, abuse of dangerous technology, unsafe flight practices, unlawful detainment, making princesses cry [ _citation needed_ ]

Ruling: life imprisonment as a test subject for corrective chess championship training (every Friday afternoon, including holidays)

♞♞♞♞♞♞♞♞♞♞

Regarding the above:

All of this could have been easily avoided if Slaine had just remembered to double tap that _one_ time. Acquire sight picture, fire, reacquire sight picture, fire again, ensure target down. Failing that, a lifetime of regret was also a very real possibility.

Inaho, in his more fuckworthy moods, sometimes referred to him as ‘Slaine the Merciful.’

It was okay. He was the bad guy.


	2. Game 1, Exhibition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pawn gambits and disrespect. With diagrams!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that the chessboard is in Slaine's pov (Black side) :D

Slaine decided that pencil skirts were not his favourite.

This was a relatively easy thing to decide, as by sole virtue of being in prison for the rest of his life, Slaine Troyard had nothing better to do than assess and analyze First Lieutenant Kaizuka Inaho’s sartorial choices.

He’d gotten exceptionally good at it, and exercised the kind of sullen contempt that could only be achieved through years of indifference and endless disappointment. Scathing remarks, impudent body language, well-timed sneers embedded with just the right amount of burning resentment. All of which had no effect on Kaizuka, of course. The outcome was the same. Slaine always received some variation of a blank, one-eyed stare in return, complete with an eyebrow comfortably arched in a perpetual state of emotional vacancy.

The nuances among Inaho’s facial expressions, if they existed, were questionable. Unfortunately, skirts and sheer stockings were a little more distinctive.

Inaho peered inside the cell, the way he did every Friday. Slaine shot upright in an appropriately catlike manner: spine rigid, feet flat on the floor, hands curled into fists.

“Søren.” His birth name. It had only become _Slaine_ to better suit the Vers aggression agenda, he had been told. That, or Versians could not spell. Norsk was hard. Preteen Søren had quickly learned to adapt to his surroundings, and his father had promptly rolled over in his space casket.

“Nice skirt.” A solid comeback from a broken man.

“I borrowed it from Yuki.”

“I’m surprised that you can’t afford your own clothes on the UFE salary,” he retorted - in English, which they both spoke fluently. Slaine hadn’t quite grasped Japanese, but sometimes Inaho bridged the language gap and talked to him in obnoxiously perfect Norwegian, too.

_Skjebne,_ as it were. Fate was a good excuse for everything. Maybe Inaho could also pour him a shot of akevitt while he pretended to be culturally inclusive.

Linguistic challenges aside, they managed to exchange their regularly scheduled pleasantries as the cuffs locked into place around his wrists. _Fuck you Kaizuka; only if you want me to._

“I’m glad you like it.” There was a click-clack of heels on concrete, as the young fashion-adverse lieutenant led Slaine down the hall to the visiting room.

He’d been doing absolutely nothing, which was still better than feigning intelligence in a board game for a dedicated hour every week. For the record, he much preferred lying down on his nice prison cot and staring at the plaster ceiling while he waited to die.

> i gave up on time  
>  just like you said you would  
>  there are tiny cracks of light underneath me and you say i got it wrong  
>  but i try hard to uncover them

 ♜♞♝♚♛♝♞♜ 

“You’re an idiot,” Slaine said sincerely, but he held out his hand to shake. That was what chess players did.

Instead of accepting the handshake, Inaho reached across the table to grip the thin wrist, and stared intently at Slaine’s forearm, which was covered with fresh pinch marks and fading bruises. Sugarcoated red.

“I asked you to stop doing that.”

He jerked away, furious at being told what to do. And furious for thinking that Inaho wouldn’t notice in the first place. Slaine was damaged goods, and everyone wanted a piece. Keep Troyard hidden away in his neat little box with extra bubble wrap and double the surveillance - he’ll be a nice boy for Lieutenant Kaizuka.

“I’m not hurting anyone but myself,” he snarled. Sometimes that was the justification he made, even though it sounded stupid and weak to his own ears. He needed to hurt himself for not being strong enough to be a winner.

The other man took a moment to consider, and furrowed his eyebrows in contemplation. “I guess you’re right. But that’s enough. Seylum won’t like it.” It was a low blow, but it would have stung much worse before. These days, the guilt trip didn’t even make Slaine flinch.

“She doesn’t like anything that I do.” He slouched over a little in the metal visiting room chair, pressed the balls of his feet into the floor. “Let’s get this over with.”

(Anywhere else?)

(Not yet.)

> i have somehow got away with everything  
>  anything you ever did was strictly by design but you got it wrong  
>  and i’ll go anywhere but there

He’d spent three birthdays with Inaho, and every year for his present he cheerfully asked the lieutenant to put a bullet through his brain.

Slaine was twenty-one and very much alive.

This week’s battalion consisted of quadruple-weighted plastic on a vinyl mat. Staunton pieces, Inaho had informed him. It was a tournament legal set. Practically indestructible. (Slaine had previously shown a propensity for breaking Inaho’s expensive glass sets, although he’d deigned to be slightly more reasonable in recent visits. It didn’t mean that he actually had to be nice, though.)

Without further ado, Inaho moved a white pawn forward one square to start the game.

[1. ♙f3, Barnes Opening]

He heaved a long-suffering sigh. This was not hard to do, because he was Slaine Troyard. “Twenty possible openings, and you choose to blunder yourself from the start.” Kaizuka liked to disrespect him in subtle ways. Slaine would have rather fucked a chainsaw.

“I just wanted to make sure you were paying attention,” Inaho said, almost affably. “I want you to play for real,” he added.

“Don’t you have other people to harass?” the war criminal asked, deflecting the point his opponent was trying to make.

“You’re the only one who’s a challenge.”

For a moment, Slaine feared for the intelligence of Earth’s survivors. “But playing with me can hardly be...” he racked his brain for the unfamiliar word, “fun.” He wasn’t very good at chess, although he’d picked up a thing or two just by playing with Kaizuka, who taught by example. Inaho wasn’t a bad teacher, but Slaine refused to credit him for anything.

“I love chess,” his captor told him, in truly awe-inspiring monotone.

“It’s the only thing that you love.” Which was still one more thing than Slaine had anticipated.

Inaho put the f pawn back to its starting position and played e4 as his first move instead. It didn’t look much different to Slaine, who had never played competitively or with much interest, but even he knew that f3 in particular had been a deliberate misplay. “Happy now?”

“I hate you,” he whispered.

Inaho seemed largely unfazed. “Better than nothing. Your move.”

Chess was the only thing in the world that Kaizuka Inaho had any real attachment to. Slaine wished that he would just stop.

“Are you really going to do that? It’s an unnecessarily risky opening. I think the Sicilian is better. Your lines still haven’t improved.”

“Shut up,” he muttered, hand hovering over his chess piece. He hadn’t touched it yet. “I don’t need your help.” Pawn to d5 was perfectly sound, not that it mattered when his opponent always won regardless of strategy.

“Then you could follow up with the Dragon Variation,” Inaho continued, “which suits your playstyle -”

Slaine stopped him in his tracks with a glower that could decimate an entire city to volcanic ash. “You’re making that up.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are!”

“No I’m not. It’s in the book I gave you that you didn’t read.”

“It’s _my_ turn.” Irrefutable logic.

“You’re right.” Inaho blinked, then stared at him. “Do what you want.”

It did get lonely without any other visitors, he would freely admit, but what they had here was not human interaction. At least they didn’t have to pretend that they liked each other.

**Game 1, Exhibition**  
Kaizuka Inaho (White) vs Søren Fucking Troyard (Black)

[1. ♙e4, King’s Pawn Opening; ♟d5, Scandinavian Defense]

Slaine advanced his army in smooth motions, sliding the pieces where he could instead of picking them up. Inaho commanded his with practiced quickness, small hands nimbly moving across the board in calculated confidence.

The UFE officer pointed reproachfully at Slaine’s pawn. “I’m not going to fall for that.” He sounded annoyed, as if he’d been expecting Slaine to make a brilliant counter.

“Such a shame.”

Thus, the first pawn gambit was denied, in much the same way that Slaine was denied general peace and quiet, and the game proceeded as normal - tediously.

“I slept with everyone on the Deucalion,” Inaho offered, as he moved a white knight forward.

Slaine didn’t bother to disguise the choking noise that he made. He couldn’t tell if that was a bluff - he wouldn’t exactly put it past his rival, who was cold, ruthless, and had just turned up to work wearing his own sister’s clothes.

Playing safe, he settled for an equally offhand, “Earth really is so fortunate to have you as its heralded hero.” Slaine followed up with a knight of his own.

“I have no qualms with data retrieval methods. That’s how you win wars, Slaine.”

He grimaced, like he’d just tasted something very sour. “I’m no stranger to deception,” he said, trying to maintain the conversational tone. He wasn’t going to bite. He knew better by now. “If anyone can militarize sex, and make it strategic, it would be you.” It was suitably backhanded, as he had perfected over time. Blood, sweat, tears, and razor sharp comebacks made Slaine. Prison was the perfect place to wax poetic.

“You’ve become cynical,” Inaho remarked. Matter-of-fact, like a casual chat about the weather. The meteorology of Slaine Troyard, cloudy with a chance of cynicism and death threats.

“I think it suits me just fine.”

“I liked it better when you cried.”

> and you had best believe  
>  that you cannot build what i don’t need  
>  and i know i need to feel relief

 

[19. ♗Bc6; ♟bxc6 - _illegal move_ ]

Slaine stroked his chin thoughtfully as he captured an attacking bishop - a move that also placed his King into check. “All right. You win. Go home. I’m sure there’s urgent paperwork that must be done.”

Inaho was not pleased, however, and showed it by raising his voice a fraction. He only ever raised his voice when he talked about chess. “That’s an illegal move. Put it back.”

“Who’s arbiting?” he asked, pretending to examine his king. Smooth black plastic. Heavy, but not heavy enough to make an impact in Inaho’s face. Humanity failed him at crucial moments.

“I am, of course.”

“And...” Slaine, doer of far more illegal things, such as murder, ventured slyly, “do you like what you see?”

“No. Your positioning is weak.” Inaho continued to remain remarkably tone deaf while keeping a precise stranglehold on all the choke points that really mattered. “If you put your own king into check again, I’ll stay here until you show me that you know how to play properly. So put. It. Back.”

It was a loaded threat. Even when Inaho was busy, he would always make time for Slaine. In fact, he had spent a few nights in the cell with Slaine as punishment for simply breaking a few chess rules. Knight to floor, rook to floor, all major pieces opened up for immediate sacrifice. They hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary, just stared each other down until Slaine had snapped and thrown the board aside and -

And Inaho had immediately reassembled the pieces exactly as they were and acted as though nothing had happened. Typical Orange, covering up the evidence.

Because, for some inexplicable reason, despite the angry sex and the veiled threats and the casual fuck yous and the self-deprecating lies, Inaho had a stubborn fixation on keeping the rules safe. The sanctity of chess was safe, because that was the important part. Not Slaine’s sanity or his self-worth, not the concept of real tangible justice or world peace. Just chess, a stupid game whose sole purpose was to serve as a plastic metaphor for war. They didn’t need a plastic metaphor to know that he was a bad tactician.

But Slaine, silently reflecting alone in his cell like a good repentant prisoner, had realized that this ordeal, maybe, was an indication that Inaho did care about something. His own feelings, on the other hand, had not been spared, and he had cried, threatened, and fought his hardest until his voice was hoarse and his vision was blurry with tears. It was ugly and chaotic, but also strangely beautiful to see the world through a lens that wasn’t vapid and artificial or distorted by power. Here, everything was clear-cut and unemotional.

So he put his pawn back, and played the way Inaho wanted him to. He had no choice but to run. Inaho kept cornering him into check, but refused to let it end.  Kaizuka was happy to whittle his army down before committing to a mate.

Slaine was fairly dry-eyed these days. At least in front of Kaizuka, who didn’t deserve to see him cry. The hate had calcified over time, and he’d almost forgotten what it was like to not feel detached, to not be so impossibly sad and alone. His cuts ran too deep, and he would wear the scars forever.

He’d been set up to fail from the start; mired in murderous apathy, steeped in half-baked revenge plots and all the incompetence of a thousand fluctuating emotions thrown into an Aldnoah-powered blender and _oh fuck I think we’ve made a terrible mistake._ Revolutions beginning with tears and ending in disaster, cautionary tales of blind devotion and spur of the moment decisions that had carved a mangled path of destruction. A brand new fifty-page historical narrative added to every high school’s mandatory curriculum. Justice and shit.

And beneath that thin coat of UFE coverups lay the awful, sinking realization that he was cripplingly unspecial, and that the world would go on without him. Slaine took it all on himself and bore the weight on his shoulders, let it crush him to dust. If he got all the blame for it, he didn’t care. They were his mistakes, and he would take the fall.

Lately he had taken to biting his nails, which were ragged and uneven at the tips. The habit didn’t stop the pinch marks that ran along his forearms, though, and every time he made sure to dig a little deeper. He would think of the things he’d done and _hadn’t_ done, and he would press his fingernails into his arms so hard that the grooves they etched became bleeding jagged lines. It made him weightless, and that was the best feeling next to numbness. If he got caught, he would just find a better hiding place.

He was left frustrated, incomplete, longing for a connection but terrified to ask. Killing him would have been too nice, he reasoned. Inaho liked to play with broken toys.

As it turned out, some people took the nihilistic approach to life after losing everything they’d ever loved. He didn’t reach for the skyline anymore. Slaine was no good, and that was good enough.

> i know i need to feel released  
>  take care to tell it just as it was  
>  take care to tell on me for the cause

 

[49. ♖a8# - _checkmate_ ]

Today, the first game ended in a long, drawn out victory for White. This was one of Inaho’s favourite ways to win: by chasing Slaine around the board, forcing him to play cat and mouse in a fluorescent-lit, glass-walled room while security cameras recorded his every spastic muscle twitch. The other way was to pontificate on the finer points of chess, such as not losing to a four-move checkmate.

“You can just keep me in check forever,” Slaine offered, still heartily caustic, “and we’ll never have to play this again.” He couldn’t believe that so much time had been wasted.

“Then we can play shogi. It’s even harder.”

He let out a violent curse, in a mix of both languages. “Don’t you find it boring to win all the time?”

“Then you should get good at the game.”

“I don’t want to.” Childish, sullen, and uncooperative; staples of the Versian mandate.

“We can play for something else.” Inaho usually played for information.

“What about clothes?”

“You only have seven pieces of clothing.” Kaizuka had been too ready with that answer.

Slaine thought briefly. “Seven?”

“Exactly,” the lieutenant said, counting them off on his fingers. “Shirt, undershirt, pants, underwear - I assume, but I could be mistaken, as I never implemented x-ray vision - both shoes, and necklace, correct? It might be difficult.”

“This hardly counts,” he responded, grasping the pendant that hung at his neck while his handcuffs jangled, “but I’m -”

_(so tired)_

“- used to being at a disadvantage.”

This was a strange way to prolong the inevitable, Slaine thought. Unrefined, skirting around physicality, playing mind games.... The Kaizuka method.

“Do you want my jacket? I have more layers than you.”

“I don’t need your jacket. Or your sympathy, if that’s what we can call it.”

“Just evening out the playing field. You’re not very good at this, after all. You don’t think ahead, and you never win.” Indeed, the closest Slaine had gotten to any kind of victory was a draw by stalemate, and even then neither of them had really been trying.

“We’re playing _chess,_ like we do every week,” he said, although his tone wasn’t entirely unfriendly. “It’s just a game.”

“This is completely different. The stakes are much higher, wouldn’t you agree? You’re definitely going to try harder.” Inaho set a timer on the table and stood up to carefully rotate the board while Slaine watched. “You start on white this time. You act, I react. I’ll play with a time limit.”

He raised an eyebrow. “That’s quite the handicap, Kaizuka.”

Inaho proffered the key to his cuffs. “Well, I have to impress you somehow.”


End file.
